Yesterday's iTunes update brought a new feature -- a small arrow next to the song, artist, and album entries in the Library and playlists, as seen at left. When clicked, this arrow takes you to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), and displays the relevant matching information. While this is potentially quite useful, it's also odd -- I know I wasn't expecting to jump to the iTMS when I clicked the arrow! Thankfully, there are already two workarounds, one temporary and one permanent:

Temporary fix: Just hold down the Option key prior to clicking the arrow; you'll jump to the matching info in your Library instead of the iTMS. For instance, Option-click next to an artist's name, and you'll see all of that artist's entries in your library.

Permanent fix: If, like me, you think the Option-click method should be the standard, quit iTunes, open a Terminal window, and type:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

When you re-launch iTunes, you'll find that clicking the arrow now takes you to your Library, and an Option-click takes you to the store. If, for some reason, you find that you'd like the old method back, just repeat the above command with NO at the end, instead of YES.

if you go to terminal and type this:
strings /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes | more

you will see all of the text strings embedded in the compiled application. it also shows a lot of random junk which is just chunks of the binary data which look like possible strings to the 'strings' program. I guess people must just hunt for strings that look like possible preference settings names?

boing
copyright (c) Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Nomad MuVo [I've used my Muvo on this computer.... I wasn't expecting it to by stored in the program's package however.]
A few long strings that look like serial numbers, possibly a DRM key or something?
WOAFWOAFWAF
WOARWOARWAR
WOASWOASWAS
`myTestString
Encoder too old! Aborting...
iTunesStoreDemoMode [...eh?]
a loooooong series of 0's and 1's

The link to the original discoverer discusses it without much detail. Basically you type
strings /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes
and look for interesting things. You need to guess which strings are preferences and what values they can take (sometimes the values appear near the strings).

What would you expect it to do? Artist/album can be browsed for with the Browse pane, and song brings you to the album with the song selected. But what would composer do? There's no way to browse by composer.

So why is there an arrow there? If it doesn't do anything it shouldn't appear. To be fair, Apple isn't making this arrow-function-switching feature mainstream (no GUI preference for it), and perhaps this is one reason.

Bug in this feature
Authored by: tribalogical on May 03, '04 12:29:14AM

well, they do let you browse by composer on the iTMS, or so it seems... mostly what I get when I do that is the song itself highlighted, and the album it was released on. Not exactly a "show me everything by that composer" result is it....!

That said, it does seem a bug to me as well. If I have Composer in my view list, I can "sort" by composer, so it seems just as with the other items, I should be able to create a 'common list' of songs by the same composer simply by clicking the button...

I mean, isn't this just a database after all, and these buttons "filtered queries"?

I agree with the original poster. Although you can't sort in the Browse Mode by composer, clicking the arrow button next to Composer in the view list should result in a filtered list by that composer....

I'm always amazed at how many hidden preferences there are in various programs. If they went to the trouble of including that feature, why didn't they add a checkbox to the preferences window? It would take apple all of about two minutes to make this a point-and-click feature.

My theory is that the programmers do development with many things changable via preferences. Before final releases usability testing (or usability experts) determine what preferences would be of use to enough people to justify leaving them in the public interface. Too many options can obscure the more commonly useful options and confuse novice users.

It would be nice to have an expert pane in the preferences dialog that exposed all the hidden preferences.

It's also a matter of testing and stability. While it hardly seems likely in this particular instance, in some cases there isn't sufficient time before a launch date (or perhaps money in the budget) to test a feature to ensure that it both functions properly and doesn't endanger the application's stability.

The dysfunction of the arrow in the composer field might even indicate that this is why there isn't a preference to modify this feature. Except...

If you don't have the ITMS visible/active (which I, for one, would really rather not) you don't see the arrows at all.

---
It's a little more starry eyed than thin-lipped.
http://regency.newarcadia.com/

Yeah, I was thinking that, but I couldn't find any preferences in the registry. Doesn't anyone know where these are kept? And can they be editted? If I could at least get to them, I probably could take some guesses as to how this option would need to be added.

Someone would need to decode the stream of hex digits (should be elementary) and then see what format this chunk of "preferences" are actually in. There certainly are a lot of zeros, so I'm suspecting it's some binary data structure that contains the preferences... so it may not be very easy to modify directly. Oh well.

Enabling the arrows without the Music Store
Authored by: jolinwarren on Apr 30, '04 03:39:40AM

This is a very useful hint, but does anyone know how to enable the arrows without having the iTunes Music Store enabled? Aside from the fact that I have no desire to buy DRM-crippled music, I live in Scotland, so the music store isn't even available here. I would like to remove it from the left panel (as I have in previous versions of iTunes), but the new arrows are useful. A bit of a quandry! Does anyone have any suggestions?

well, yes, you can turn off the arrows using iTunes Prefs/General... simple as that! :)

Turn off the store however, and the arrows go away too... meaning, we can't use this nifty hint using the arrows on the library, unless the iTMS is also showing in iTunes. Not a major deal, but well... maybe in the next rev we can have one without the other...?

which unfortunately is in win.ini type format with long strings of hex digits in the various categories. Since the original hint was a boolean, presumably flipping one bit in this 73K file will do it...

I'm having trouble getting this command to run in Terminal. I keep getting the message: -bash: defaults: command not found. I have no idea what any of the Terminal stuff means, I just don't want those arrows pointing to the Music Store. Any help?

I thought this had broken for me after upgrading to iT version 6.01. (I had used the above terminal command to modify a previous version of iT.) Clicking on an arrow would bring me to my library, but wouldn't filter by the artist, album etc.

Then I realized the fix: if you've turned on "Show Search Bar", turn it off. If the search bar is active, it screws up the function.

In fact, it doesn't matter if you've modified iTunes. The un-modified option-click (which normally brings you to your library) breaks when the search bar is showing. This is with v6.01.